Saramago

[Joseph Tracy]

Just read Saramago's "All The Names".   Heir to Kafka? I admit  I don't think I could pick up Kafka at this point, but I am weirdly attracted to Saramago.  His work delves into the potentially mind numbing arena where bureaucratic obedience and fear-of-losing-job subservience all work to  support upper level paranoia and create a police state. He transforms this in classic novelistic tradition, as 1984 does by focusing on individual resistance and  using some kind of  almost miraculous event to turn the story into a social parable.  In many of his novels the God figure or state is ruthlessly cruel. In this the discovery is that the boss has a kind heart and rather likes a rebel, is perhaps a secret rebel too.  Why not?

I just saw Blindness a couple nights ago which I also want to read, having read the sequel- Seeing.  I thought the movie was really well made and well acted, perhaps slightly flawed in looking too much like Children of Men, but Saramago may have been responding to PD James work.  Saramago's woman heroes are more credible to me; nether rambo in drag nor the one brilliant techno-wizard in a world of lessers. The blindness  in this story is not so much a miracle but an outward evidence of an inward state.